5.are You My Mentor? (lean In)

Hello Everyone!

It’s been a long time. Hope you are doing well. I am doing awesome since I got to do shopping on my own in the weekend. The best part of the shopping this time is my husband didn’t tag along. So, I had the liberty to swipe his card whenever I wanted. He got shocked to find his bank balance later. That’s totally a different story. Poor hubby! Anyways, I bought few curtains for my home. I spent the entire day hanging them. When I was hanging the curtain in the main door, I observed the neighbour’s kid moving out of the house with his school bag. Which school can possibly be open in the evening time? I got curious and can’t refrain myself from asking him where he was going. He gave me a look as though it was obvious and replied that he was on the way to his private tuition. What?! He is in Kindergarten. I went to tuition when I was in my final year in school. You will have to agree that those subjects are really tough. So, it requires tuition. But, what’s so tough about kindergarten that parents can’t teach?

From childhood, I was quite interested in dancing. I used to practice the steps. Ofcourse, when I am pretty sure no one was watching me. Seeing my interest, my mom enrolled me in dance class when I was 13. But what happened next wasn’t what I expected. I got to know that I actually am pretty bad at dance. I never missed to get scolding from my teacher. I gave expressions in face, but never really danced. I should have danced in front of someone before, so my mom wouldn’t have wasted her hard earned money. Let’s come to main point. My parents can’t help me teaching me dance, so they enrolled me in a coaching class. That appears to be a valid reason compared to kindergarten tuition. We will have to get help to learn new things. That’s how it is, isn’t it? So, when it comes to becoming a leader, we will end up searching for a teacher. In corporate terminology, they are called mentors. So, whenever we come across successful people, we might end asking them to be our mentor. It’s quite natural. But is that right?

In my organization, we have an official mentorship programme, in which a mentor will be assigned to each one of us. We will have regular mentor-mentee meetings and discuss about the issues we face. I will have to agree that I got immense benefits from that programme. It helped me to connect personally with my mentor. I found that trust is the basic mantra in mentorship. We should be able to discuss anything with the mentor. I had that liberty in the relationship with my mentor. Just because I had that liberty, it doesn’t mean I can end up complaining too much to my mentor. That will eventually ruin the professional relationship we have. So, we should know the effective way to utilize the mentorship programmes.

But not all organizations have official mentorship programme. So, we will have to find a mentor on our own. Sheryl had explained clearly in her book about the mentorship. She agrees mentorship and sponsorship are very important when we have to grow up the ladder. But we shouldn’t blindly focus on getting a mentor. She makes it clear that it is never “Get a mentor and you will excel” but it is actually the other way – “Excel and you will get a mentor”. So, the first step to get a mentor is to excel. She also mentioned “Tiara Syndrome”. You may wonder what it is. Sheryl states that as “Women expect that if they keep doing their job well someone will notice them and place a tiara on their head”. So, just excelling won’t get us a good mentor. Additionally, we will have to step up and claim our position. That’s something we will have to work on. Let me a take a break and think about it.

See you all soon with the next post. Until then, bye!